I am deficient at thing-putting

Hello!  It snowed here today.

One of the quirks of living in an old house is there is never enough storage.  People have so much more STUFF in the 21st century than they did in the 19th century.  JD and I probably have enough clothing to serve at least four or five families from 150 years ago.  We have hundreds of books.  We have more kitchen gadgets than you can shake a stick at.  There are just never enough places to put all these things.  (And this is after many purges on my part.  I regularly toss, sell, or donate clothing and household items.)

As far as I can tell, the house was designed with almost no storage, possibly none at all (not counting the attic).  What storage there is seems to have been added later.  There are four closets on the two main living floors.  There are two in our bedroom.  Only one of those has decent amounts of room, and that one is taken up by my husband's wardrobe of button down shirts and nice pants.  My closet is about two feet wide, and not deep enough to comfortably hold a hanger.

The guest closet is mostly full of sleeping bags.

Downstairs, our coat closet is about three feet wide, and again not quite deep enough for a hanger.  Plus, it is nowhere near a door.  The only things we store in there are things we don't use regularly.  Jackets we actually want to wear, we hang on the hooks I installed in the hallway - just kinda hanging out there.  Not super grown up looking, but functional.

Way more outer coverings than actually fit in the closet.

JD and I spent some time this evening brainstorming on storage solutions.  Both of us are pretty sick of the piles of things.  They need places to live.  These are categories of things that need homes: towels, dog clothing, daypacks (and hydration and fanny packs), shoes, extra jackets, excess horse tack, and extra bottles of nutritional supplements.  As of now (and for much of the last 13 years) they have just drifted around the house, washing up on various shores.  When we need a space free, we move the things elsewhere.  And then we can't find them.  

I hope to change that, sometime soon.  It would be nice to have  my things accessible, findable, and yet not in my face.  (JD's things, too.)  I hope that some of tonight's pictures will be invalid once we implement the solutions.

 This corner is full of books.  So are all the other corners.   That's okay, though.  They're on shelves!

Behind the chair lurk the shoes.  Hard to reach and totally disorganized.  At least they're hidden.

Our sole downstairs closet, inaccessible in the dining room.

And, of course, a coat rack full of bridles.. and no coats.  (And some cats, who refuse to be categorized.)

Woooo!

I didn't realize just how much caffeine I'd had with dinner until I realized I was talking very excitedly about nooks and crannies.  I was debating which were better with JD, and feeling very happy.  And maybe my voice was getting a little loud.  It's just not normal to get that worked up about English muffins.  I put down my glass of diet Coke.  The accommodating waitstaff at Chanan's had been refilling it frequently.  Your guess is as good as mine as to how much soda I had. 

Probably it could be calibrated on the strength of my urge to shout "Woooo!"

People like me probably shouldn't have caffeine after breakfast.

Still on my high, I came home and sorted out my next three weeks worth of vitamins, ordered stuff I was low on, and did some more kitchen organization.  I had some kind of weird post-eight-minutes-of-jogging high last night, and I measured the kitchen.  First I determined that we actually have an above average amount of counter space.  He Who Does All The Cooking feels like we have no space at all.  In fact, we have an average if not bounteous amount of space.  It was just all covered in.. stuff.  Things.  Things which we like and want to have around.  But things which perhaps I could relocate a little farther from the food prep surfaces.

So I measured, then I took inventory.  And I prioritized.  I was like a redheaded Martha Stewart with the organizing and the thinking.  I tossed my beat up old breadbox, stowed this, reorganized the other.. and the counters are more clear.  Or will be until the next time JD does something in the kitchen.

Caffeine.  It lurks, silently.